Murray Maloney wrote:
> So, I may be alone -- consider this a cry in the dark -- but I still
> don't think
> that the browser should define HTML. That was the POV that was pomulgated
> by Mosaic and Netscape developers back in 1994. I didn't buy it then and I
> don't buy it now. HTML is more than what the browser guys say it is.
Speccing how browsers should behave in a way that makes them interoperable is a
*help* to people who want to do something other than render HTML to a
desktop-sized graphical display device. At the moment there are four major
browsers with four slightly different sets of quirks in areas where HTML has
traditionally been underspecified (e.g. handling misnested tags). Therefore when
authors check their code (i.e. load it into a high-marketshare graphical browser
and check the rendering) there's no way to know how any other UA will handle
that content. By defining the behaviour of browsers we can change that and so
help low-marketshare UAs (e.g. speech, tactile, etc. browsers) deal with HTML
documents in a more robust way that is idential to the UAs in which the content
is likely to be tested. This methodology is optimised for success in the real
world where sites are deemed done when they work in graphical UAs with more than
a total X% of the market (where X is typically ~95), rather than in an
non-existant ideal world where every document is totally compliant with the
browser spec and tested over multiple media before being deployed.
But I have a feeling that I'm not understanding you. To me "support existing
content" is a synonym for "have HTML5 implemented" (since no browser will
implement significant compatbility-breaking changes). I can't believe that you
are here to work on a document format that no one will use, so I must be missing
something...
--
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
-- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead